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Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital
An anonymous reader writes linking to this story at stuff.co.nz, excerpting: "Five hundred powerful computers used by Weta Digital to help create the special effects for the Lord of the Rings may be put up for hire.... The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 [gigabytes?] of memory." Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S : The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
And the big liability here is the same, it's WETA's farm. It is obvious they didn't really think it through when they set up this farm.
My buddies in Australia and NZ tell me their internet costs are extremely high, they pay little for incoming data but pay up the wazoo for outgoing data. So let's say I zap a few gigs of model and map data from my studio in Hollywood, no problem, but when they want to send back terabytes or more of uncompressed, rendered frames, it's going to cost a whole lot more than that render farm down the street which is easily accessible by cheap US networking, or I could just drive in and pick up a stack of Exabyte tapes. No wonder you heard tales of WETA fedexing iPods around with compressed rushes. I worked with a lot of Hollywood producers and they're always in a hurry, Fedex from NZ isn't going to work too well.
One big lesson I learned in Hollywood is that you'd have to be an idiot to actually BUY a huge CG render rig. Everyone who builds a big rig is absolutely the state of the art when they BEGIN the project. But by the time they finish, the rig is obsolete, the studio down the street with the NEW project is now the state of the art. I've seen CG studios take huge losses on Big Iron like Connection Machines, Crays, etc, they were all acclaimed for their work, but after the big project, they all limped along trying to rent out the CPU for other projects, until they went bankrupt after a few more months. So it makes no sense to build your own render farm when you can lease it and create a virtual studio. Why accumulate hardware, which depreciates so quickly? Boy did WETA fuck up on this one.